Cascade Raptor Center: Capture. The nature of cruelty

Feld's "Cascade Raptor Center: Capture," made me think of the futility of forgiveness when it comes to loss and nature.  A boy accidentally shoots down a hawk with his new gun yet his apologies are made meaningless by the inevitability of death. The boy's actions are irreversible and the bird irrecoverable. The boy goes through mental hurdles to convince his innocence which is signified by the repetition of the line "He hadn't meant to hit the bird," varying with emphasis on different words through the use of italics in the firth through fourth stanzas. The speaker, present at the Raptor Center, goes through his own stages how he tells the story. In the first stanza the speaker has sort of an objective stance on the nature of the cruel situation, detailing the state of the bird's body, "We lifted the red-tail, half dead with loss / of blood ... when she flicked the milky filters of her eyelids ... " And at the end of the stanza the objectivity turns inwards and subjective "I saw my shadow-shape projected across / a screen, grown representative and monstrous." The speaker shifts out of objectivity towards indifference and pain which is noted later on. Stanza four heightens the sense of futility with “I tried to follow the thought back to those fields / where nothing ever changes but the weather” … then his pain and indifference is brought up later in the same stanza with “as we ignored him – if he’d killed a man we’d all / have been the more compassionate, the less appalled.” And again the fifth stanza “He hadn’t meant to hit the bird. Who cared?”